I Am Just Alpha’s Shield to Protect Her Chapter 08

I Am Just Alpha’s Shield to Protect Her Chapter 08

Iceland was cold and beautiful.

I sat at a window table in a small café in Reykjavik, both hands wrapped around a mug of tea, watching snow come down outside.

The wind off the water was sharp, but I’d bought myself a good down coat.

My suitcase was nearly empty. Everything I’d brought, everything that had been his, was buried somewhere out in the white, in a place I’d never find again.

Three years.

Done.

Lucas found me on a snowy Saturday.

He was in a light jacket, completely wrong for the weather. He was shaking when I spotted him outside my building, his face gaunt, the circles under his eyes so dark they looked painted on.

He’d lost weight.

The moment he saw me, something desperate lit up in his eyes.

“Raven!”

He stumbled toward me.

I kept walking, face empty, aimed for the door.

“Raven!” His hand closed around my wrist. “I finally found you. Please, just let me explain—”

“Let go.” I looked at him coldly.

“I won’t.”

His eyes went red around the edges immediately.

“I ended it with Seraphina for good. The pendant she had was a fake. She had it made just to mess with you. She admitted it herself.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Glad you figured that out.”

My calm undid him faster than anything else could have.

“Raven, please—” His voice broke apart. He was begging now, genuinely, not for show. “I know I was wrong. I know. But you used to care so much about me, my leg is killing me out here, it’s freezing, can we please just go back south—”

I looked at his purple lips and gave a mocking smile.

“If you’re cold,” I said, “go home.”

I peeled his fingers off my wrist, one by one.

“Lucas, stop. You didn’t worry about whether I was hurting when you were busy keeping Seraphina happy. Don’t start now.”

He went gray.

I swiped into the building. The door shut in his face.

He stayed.

He stood out there in the snow all night.

The next morning my roommate mentioned that some guy had been taken away by ambulance. Old leg injury, severe frostbite.

She asked if I knew that poor guy.

“No,” I said, and turned the page.

Sophomore year, that fall, I started seeing someone.

His name was Liam Hayes. He was the kind of person who made everything feel a little quieter.

He didn’t send me out in a storm at midnight for late-night food runs. He didn’t treat what I gave him like it was owed.

On cold days he’d tuck my freezing hands into his coat pockets. When my wolf nature made me restless, he’d just sit with me and not make a big deal of it.

And when Liam looked at me, he only ever saw me.

Lucas didn’t disappear. He kept showing up at the edges of my life, impossible to fully shake.

My blocked contacts list grew as he burned through new numbers. Returned packages piled up at the campus mail center.

Eventually he stopped sending things.

He started coming in person instead.

Until the day he saw Liam hand me an ice cream cone and tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.

Lucas snapped.

He crossed the distance between us fast, eyes bloodshot, grabbed my arm, and glared at Liam.

“Who is he?!”

“My boyfriend.” I pulled free and looked at him steadily.

“You lied to me—” His whole body shook. Tears came before he could stop them. “You told me once that I was the only person you’d ever love—”

“I did say that,” I told him.

My voice didn’t waver.

“But that was a long time ago.”

“The girl who loved you without limits, who gave everything and expected nothing back, she died in the rain that night. Down south.”

I held his gaze.

“You killed her.”